MIDDLEBURY – As a child, Bruce Lisman once dug up saplings from the woods behind his family’s Burlington home and replanted them in the yard.

“My father’d say, ‘Where’d that tree come from?’ I’d say, ‘It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it,’” Lisman said, laughing. “Early on they didn’t do well, but you figure out how to do it.”

Lisman, now a shy 69-year-old Republican candidate for governor who still lights up when he talks about trees, has helped to plant thousands of them over his lifetime.

After making a fortune on Wall Street and spending several years dipping into Vermont public policy, Lisman is convinced Vermont needs him to dig up and rearrange the government.

“I bring competence to state government, a phenomenon you may not be used to,” Lisman said at a December candidates’ forum.

Lisman prides himself on recruiting and mentoring talented people. He told a group of Addison County business leaders last week that he is already working to convince an opiate-addiction treatment expert in Texas, for example, to move north for his gubernatorial administration.

The candidate, who has never sought or held elected office, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to finance his campaign.

He believes Vermonters should be angry — about Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, whom he labels “incompetent,” and about his Republican rival Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, whom he says should have staged a protest against Shumlin’s policies.

“No one — and I mean no one — in government has listened to you or your neighbors,” Lisman said at the Republican state convention in May.

Lisman has crafted a campaign that balances his well-connected Wall Street background with stories that emphasize a Vermont childhood and a self-made career.

When he disclosed a net worth of about $50.9 million, his campaign tacked on photos of Lisman’s modest childhood home in Burlington’s Old North End, and of the candidate as a turtleneck-wearing young professional.

At Bear Stearns Companies Inc. he found the identity that would follow him into politics: Bruce Lisman the manager.

“Early on though I learned I could manage people, and I liked it, and it turned out they liked working for me,” Lisman said. He became co-head of the institutional equities division at Bear Stearns, a position he would hold until 2008 when Bear Stearns fell into a merger with J.P. Morgan.

As his career accelerated, Lisman’s wife Ruth was diagnosed with breast cancer, which would take her life after nine years of illness in 1999.

To this day, Lisman counts that time of navigating his two young daughters through their mother’s illness as one of his proudest accomplishments.

“I kept saying to myself, I’m just not figuring this thing out. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. It was pretty chaotic,” Lisman said.

Several years later, as chairman of the University of Vermont Board of Trustees, Lisman led the search that selected Dan Fogel as the university’s president in 2001.

“He was the perfect person for a moment in time when the university was struggling,” said Martha Heath of Westford, a former Democratic state representative who served with Lisman on the UVM Board of Trustees’ search committee.

Heath is supporting Democrat Sue Minter in the governor’s race, but she continues to respect Lisman’s time as a “quiet, calm leader” at UVM.

The soft-spoken Lisman sometimes turns confrontational, such as when he released campaign advertisements portraying Shumlin as a puppet of big-money interests and Scott as a complicit bystander.

In 2004, he clashed with neighbor Jon Fishman, drummer for the band Phish, over a proposed wind turbine on Fishman’s property. Fishman described Lisman as “entirely uncompromising” and willing to do or spend whatever was necessary to stop the turbine.

Lisman declined to address Fishman’s charges because, he said, the episode happened so long ago. But he noted that as a candidate he has continued to raise similar concerns about where renewable energy projects should be built. He has called for a two-year moratorium on large wind and solar projects if he is elected governor.

Lisman returned full-time to Vermont in 2009, about a year after Bear Stearns merged into J.P. Morgan, and settled in Shelburne with his second wife, Kyla Sternlieb. He soon found two new Vermont projects to keep him busy.

With the help of his childhood friend Paul Bruhn at the Vermont Preservation Trust, Lisman spent more than $100,000 planting trees in Vermont downtowns. He also co-founded Campaign for Vermont, a group that pushes for government ethics, local control of education and smaller state budget increases.

His gubernatorial bid grew out of a retirement pastime of driving around Vermont and hearing the life stories of business owners, doctors, artists in the wake of the financial crisis.

“I have to overcome a tendency to look at my shoes,” Lisman said over lunch on the campaign trail in Middlebury, after giving his stump speech over breakfast in Shelburne and shaking hands at Vermont Coffee Co., where he marveled at new assembly-line equipment. He imagines spending much of his time as governor building relationships with employers.

“We need to do a lot of things that aren’t going to be headline grabbers,” Lisman said. “Recasting the nature of how an administration would run a government is not the stuff of glamour.”

As for the trees he planted in Vermont towns? He’s ready to analyze his mistakes and try another round.

“We could do it more effectively to ensure better outcomes,” Lisman said. “Performance everything, right?”

This story was first posted online June 23, 2016. Contact April Burbank at 802-660-1863 or aburbank@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AprilBurbankDo you have a breaking news tip? Call us at 802-660-6500 or send us a post on Facebook or Twitter using #BFPTips.